Sunday, September 27, 2015

A humanist
pope? It’s almost an oxymoron but as popes go Francis is the best. His message
was more universal, lower-case catholic than upper-case. It has been a good
week for the planet.

In a few days
he changed the conversation, shunned opulence to be among the least, modeling a
back to Jesus moment for the
faithful. He reminded the suits that refugees and the homeless are not just numbers
but humans, called for responsible governance, urged action be taken to halt
climate change, argued against the death penalty and even got John Boehner to
pray for him, step down, stop crying and start smiling again.

Yet he got one
thing wrong. He canonized the colonizer, Junipero Serra. At the time of the
American Revolution Serra was busy in California jamming the cross down the
throat of the indigenous people whether they liked it or not. There is evidence
that he enslaved the Indians and forced them to build nine missions.

The Church was
part of the Spanish rapacious power structure; a shameful chapter in European
history still with its after-shocks.

No doubt by
some act of providential intervention Yogi Berra choose this time to die. Now
here was a man who not only performed miracles, he was one. He took the fork in
the road less travelled to get to the restaurant nobody went to because it was
too busy. He didn’t even say half the things that he said. This is enough to be
sanctified.

His feats on
the field also left us scratching our head. His strike zone seemed to extend
from one dugout to the other. He swung at pitches from his shoe laces to his helmet.
Yet he never struck out more than 38 times in a season. Compare this with today’s
sluggers sometimes whiffing over 200 times. Standing at just 5 ft. 7 inches he was still a power hitter. Four more home runs and he would
have surpassed Joe DiMaggio. As Yogi said, 90% of the game is 50% mental.

At the mention of
Yogi Berra’s name a smile crosses your face. While Father Serra stole the native language, Father Berra gave voice to the common
tongue. His blurts became immortal and raised illogic to new heights. Yogi not
Junipero, Berra not Serra should have been sainted.

Friday, September 25, 2015

Kew Forest is
its name. A residential tree-shaded, narrow street three blocks long. It was my
crucible, the center of my canvas in the neighborhood of my mind. We lived on
the edge of Kew Gardens and Forest Hills. Hence the name, Kew Forest. Lifted
from the British Kew of Botanical Gardens, there were no such gardens here nor
were there any forests or hills.

A few steps
from our apartment house was my father’s corner drugstore, named Kew Forest
Pharmacy, the vapors of which still reside in my nostrils. That special
mingling of perfume, egg salad or tuna from the sandwich board and crude drugs
seeping out of apothecary jars can never again be replicated.

Against the
outer wall of the store I spent many innings of my childhood throwing tennis
balls or pink Spauldeens in a simulated ballgame of which I was batter, fielder
and ump. Over time I beat a portal through that wall and took my father’s
place.

All this was
recently brought back to mind by, of all people, Donald Trump. It seems that
for two years he attended Kew Forest School, now a blemish to the street of my
memory.

Directly across the entrance to my building was the private school. I never set foot inside. My school was first P.S. 99 and later a public high school. Kew Forest School took up an entire block most of which was a grassy field, the perfect park for us kids. From age
8 to 21 we scaled that chain-link fence dozens of times to play touch football or
softball.

One day I went
over with my buddy, Johnny Kassabian. He was holding a knife in his hand for
some Boy Scout project. The blade went through his arm decommissioning two
fingers. Out of this I learned the technical name for the nerve damage, Palmar fascia aponeurotic expansion of the
palmaris brevis. It marked the beginning of my love for language.

The snooty
students would frequent my father’s store. Many took booths, ordered drinks
from the twelve-seat soda fountain and sat for hours with two straws nursing a cherry
coke.

I missed Donald
by a few years but I can see him commanding his peers on the baseball
diamond, hurling insults at the opposing team having learned a life of
privilege and posturing behind that fence.

Though he has
now become part of that street of many returns I won’t let him tarnish my Edenic tableaux. Yet into each garden a little rain must fall.

He is a reminder how I once stole a broomstick from the
basement of my apartment house for a stickball bat and of my many trespasses
climbing over the Kew Forest fence. And didn't I boast and lie and sneer back then more than once? I'm sure of it. That was the Donald Trump in me. I can't recall ever winning at Monopoly, stuck for the most part at Baltic and Mediterranean while Donald was building hotels at Park Place and Boardwalk.. on the other side of the fence.

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

Not now, not even soon. But some day. I hate to give away the
ending but Shakespeare did in the first ten lines of Romeo and Juliette.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross’d lovers take their
life.

Again in two of my favorite novels (The Transit of Venus and The
Hand That First Held Mine) around page 57 we learn that the protagonist
will die young and one in a plane crash yet. Now I know what she doesn’t know.
For the next 200 pages I find myself anxious for her. What seems like a spoiler
actually creates more tension. It may be counter-intuitive but it is a clever
device.

By telling us, maybe the author is also declaring that she
subordinates plot to either the larger issues raised or her language itself.
Plot may be nothing more than the piece of red meat the burglar tosses to the
watchdog while he raids the house.

In the real world, of course, we also know the last page but
spend our lives convinced it doesn’t apply to us. We start dying the day we’re
born and start living. Fortunately I’m now too old to die young. If it said so
on page 57 it must have slipped my mind. If I forget to die there are always
enough momento mori around to remind
me.

The Greeks struggled with the notion of mortality. They
invented the gods to account for fate, happenstance and bad hair days. Any
behavior bordering on hubris (chutzpah) or otherwise offensive to the imagined
gods received a ruler to the back of the hand…or worse.

Oedipus ended up a husband and son to the same woman,
committed patricide and then got a poke in the eyes, self-inflicted. It was
enough to ruin his whole week-end.

The audience knew well the story of the myth but ate up the
telling of it. No spoiler-alerts necessary. Humankind is admonished to know its
place and not stray into the precincts of the gods. Unanswered questions were
to be addressed to Zeus and his accomplices. Messages are answered in the order
received…even if Mt. Olympus is experiencing a high-call volume.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

This Sunday the world will continue its wobbly spin. Trump
will thump his chest while bloviating. The least and dumbest among us will
appear on morning talk shows.

At the same time butterflies will flutter by and the
neighborhood hummingbird will brunch with his considerable beak into our
gourmet feeder celebrating our 29th anniversary. Not just another
day for Peggy and me.

In 1986 we made it official after 2 ½ years together. We got
it right this time. Only a few people in attendance that day are still with us.
It happens that way the second time around. How to describe bliss? I suppose
it’s bad form to publicly proclaim one’s good fortune. I might sound like
Donald Trump. But the fact is I won the human lottery.

At 94 Peggy is still in her extended prime. We don’t travel
any more but her imagination carries her to far regions off the map. If she
takes daily flights of fancy I ground her and in the process she lifts me
enough to claim a distant perch.

As a surrogate mother to at least a half dozen young(er)
friends, besides our combined families, she is a model and inspiration of how one
might be in this world pulling on inner resources. She is a harbor for my
voyage both in and out.

Peggy enthuses and her ardor is an affirmation of being
alive. It charges the air around her. Her ground, her gaze becomes a fertile
garden of possibilities with hybrid consanguinities. In a recent poem she
connects secular saints (transformational artists) with lame religion and the
faithful watching a sixteen inning baseball game.

Peggy was orphaned at eight. As a consequence she had the
benefit of two mothers. One offered unconditional love and nurtured her
imagination. Her aunt who took over gave her the tools to make her way in the
world. How she made her way to me and I to her is the stuff of a French film where
a man and a woman drift inexorably toward one another, almost meet, then almost
don’t, then do. It’s called life. It is our movie.

Friday, September 11, 2015

Most of my friends are Jewish atheists. There
are also some ex-Catholic atheists and few other denominational non-believers. (I’ll put my Buddhist ones aside since of them
I know not). I devoutly believe it is more likely for an atheist to be
religious than those observant of a religion. Or to put it another way in order
to have a religious experience it helps not to have a religion.

A house of worship is one of
the least likely places to be lifted to an, aha
dimension. I regard fundamentalist orthodoxies as a form of mental illness or
at least some sort of neurosis. Those whom I’ve encountered seem to have a
desperate need for the absolute with no room for doubt or deviation.

The noun, religion, has been
so degraded by hollow ritual, hypocrisy, fables, divisiveness and irrelevance that only the
adjective survives for me. Even then I wish for another word. Our vocabulary is
impoverished in expressing spiritual, numinous or transformational moments.

In my view organized religion has usurped and subverted the true experience which I regard as touching one's soul. We are asked to park our brains outside. The congregation of the lost hungers for that other realm but must settle for warmed over passages which numb the mind separating instead of joining with people outside those walls.

Maybe this is as it should be
since these special happenings are beyond articulation. They can be described
but not explained. However I think those soulful instances where one feels most
aligned and lifted might be more recognized if we had the words to say it.

If I’ve stepped on sacred
toes talking about that which we are never to speak God help me. It seems to me
the very subject we ought to share. I have this need to turn around the negative
of non-theism into something positive.

The atheism I embrace is not simply
a statement of rejection of a Godhead. It is an affirmation of humanity. Walls
of temples are not sacred, nor icons and edifices, nor days of the calendar,
nor ancient texts and their poetry-turned-literal. Life is holy. The natural
world deserves our reverence. How we are stewards of the planet is religious;
how we care for one another through generosity and forgiveness, how we open our
hearts to suffering, how we love and receive each other…these are among the
daily opportunities given us to go beyond.

Art embodies all this. Music,
dance, visual pieces and the written or spoken word offer a chance to connect.
But there is also art in our dailiness. In the close listening and the bearing
of witness there is a devotion I call my religion, Humanism.

Monday, September 7, 2015

Frank Dwyer stands in front of our assembled class of
octogenarians-plus at Santa Monica Emeritus and recites a rather long Longfellow
poem by heart. A minute later he is delivering The Canterbury Tales in Middle
English or passages from Shakespeare. Frank is a mere seventy years old. The
muscle of memory is what he calls it; something he nurtured back when. We
marvel at our teacher’s prodigious recall.

Besides being a poet, translator, scholar and supreme
teacher Frank is a stage actor. Thespians
are either the last vestige of the old oral tradition or the finest examples of
a new one. Their memories are a repository of our cultural heritage.

Call it a muscle or a faculty it is what most of us let fall
into disrepair decades ago when we learned how to read. Literacy replaced
memory. It is hard to imagine a pre-literate society when news was disseminated
by word of mouth often by troubadours yet hearing was the heightened sense in acoustic space. The auditory sense was acute, even
essential for survival in the bush.

Ancient texts, like Bhagavad Gita and Homeric tales, were
passed along orally. Traces of this can be found in the way children’s street-games
survive intact across generations, at least that was the case when I was a
street urchin in New York.

If memory is a muscle so can muscles hold their own memories.
Baseball players often go through a seemingly mindless ritual just to quiet
their heads and allow their muscles to work in concert.

Marshall McLuhan made the case that the advent of the
printing press extended our visual sense inordinately. Literacy became our
measure of intelligence. He argues we are now in a
post-literate stage. A certain shorthand of emojis, hashtags, avatars and icons have
created a universal language replacing the old rules of spelling and grammar.
Long-winded passages have been ceded to tropes and memes. The preferred mode of
writing is with words reduced to numbers and letters (U 8?) and acronyms
(INMO). We live in a hurry-up world.

Millennials have a disdain for lengthy texts. A shorter
perceptual span is compensated for by a more inclusive and broader visual
non-linear field. As geographical borders are being erased we are becoming
retribalized according to kindred interests.

It’s been noted that pre-literate people in
undeveloped areas have made the leap to this post-literate age more easily than
the literati. Just look at our pre-literate grandchildren whom we depend upon to get us through the day.

The effect of media goes largely unnoticed. Most of us live
our lives looking in the rear-view mirror. We judge behavior by standards no longer
viable. In this post-literate period will memory return? Perhaps it already
has. We must remember pin numbers, Social Security numbers and passwords enough
to rival a Longfellow poem. On the other hand I don’t see many people assigning
long passages of literature to their memory muscle except for Rappers who sing endless verses without benefit of the page.

After we have digitalized all our printed words and then
hacked and fracked ourselves to oblivion let the last few standing have their
memory muscles flexed to pass along our received wisdom to the visiting aliens.
It is properly called reciting by heart.

Friday, September 4, 2015

Life minus Ralph will be a deep personal loss. He was my telephone mate. I celebrate that
man I got to know particularly over this past year or two when we didn’t see
much of each other but spoke regularly. I know he could be impatient and ill-tempered
at times but the man I knew was his best version.

We would talk on the phone sometimes 4-5 times a week for half an hour or more, usually about nothing and everything. I was going to call him Monday afternoon
when I got the shocking news of his death. I was about to tell him that he
shared a birthday with Oliver Sacks. Now, like that other Oliver I want to say,
Please Sir (Ralph), I want some more.

Though it happens spontaneously there is a certain art to
conversation. It can be a creative act when the people are in resonance. Words
flow and each sentence segues to the next…sometimes a leap across time and
space. It’s a wondrous thing. And when it occurs you may look back and think, What just happened here?

How we got from A to Z is untraceable. One word reminded us
of another word or a phrase and off we’d go talking from medical matters to
baseball to Winston Churchill to some Labor-Zionist song of his to a shard in
his memory vault playing the sousaphone in a marching band with frozen lips, to
concerns about Judy, to an old movie, or a Yiddish expression, to an opera diva
he watched from his chair-bed at 4 AM to the making of an ultimate martini, to money
woes and we’d end either commiserating, laughing or both. And after all the
verbiage there was something else, unsaid but understood.

In the course of all this zig-zag we had tapped into each
other’s better angels, a room in the mansion seldom opened where we had a sort
of brotherly affection and the words to express this love.

If this was an improvisational dance we also accepted that
we had a major disagreement which required a choreography carefully avoiding the
land mine that would have brought pistols at dawn. In a certain way this made
our friendship even greater for what we valued as

higher than those hot spots.

We all have our stories to tell, part actual, part imagined
or at least embellished. Pebbles
underfoot, the polishing of years, make jewels of. Sandy Koufax said it best, “The older I get
the better I used to be.” So I lent Ralph my ear and he lent me his. Our narratives
are finally all of what we own and in the telling we discover who we are and
how we matter.

In the end it is about feeling seen and heard, beyond the
persona, even beyond long-held beliefs and passions to finally arrive at the
generous heart. Ralph found both that soulful place and high spirit. This is
what shall live on in me.